


I Still Remember

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Amnesia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-25
Updated: 2008-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:37:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The inn is like half a hundred others they've stayed in: a squat building of thick wood and heavy stone set four-square around a courtyard, the air inside smelling of stale alcohol, the customers more locals than travellers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Still Remember

**Author's Note:**

> For Amber, on her birthday. Thanks to Cate for betaing.

The inn is like half a hundred others they've stayed in: a squat building of thick wood and heavy stone set four-square around a courtyard, the air inside smelling of stale alcohol, the customers more locals than travellers. Rodney's glad to find that the food is better than average, though—a big bowl of barely-steamed vegetables and fish caught fresh from the lake, brought to the table by a woman whose hands make Rodney hope that this establishment makes at least an attempt at hygiene—but he's ambivalent about the fact that it serves up a decent ale. John's had that tight look to his face all day which means he's spoiling for a fight, and the two full glasses of beer that he downs before Rodney's finished his meal don't help: the fingers of his left hand are beating out a rhythm on the tabletop, something Rodney doesn't recognise but would bet is at least close-kin to Johnny Cash, all mingled hurt and slow-banked anger in a lone voice.

"Stop it," Rodney mumbles around his last mouthful of food; that drumming is going to give him the facial tic which even Kavanagh's incompetence had never managed to impart. John smiles brightly at him but his fingers don't stop; Rodney rolls his eyes. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Rodney wishes that Ronon and Teyla were here. They'd know what to say to bring John out of this, or even the right way of beating him up. All together they would have been team; the two of them alone, three months alone, makes for this: John broadcasting loudly that he doesn't want to talk though he's trying to tempt Rodney into speech; Rodney speaking and never getting it quite right.

Outside the windows, the Kirneasian twilight deepens; inside, the innkeeper piles more wood onto the open fire, and Rodney and John drain the earthenware jug of its strong, dark ale. Rodney drinks a little more than he'd like just to stop John from finishing it on his own; he's not keen to test what the Pegasus standard treatment for cirrhosis of the liver is, and this stuff is strong.

When the innkeeper comes back to clear their table of bowls, she favours them both with a wide smile—probably, Rodney thinks sourly, because even if she washes her hands at least once a day, she's still gouging them for the price of their room and board.

"You boys here for next week's market?" she asks, leaning in to light the great carved candelabra which sits in the centre of the table, coaxing dozens of flames into sputtering life.

"Sure," John says, settling back in his seat with a smile so fake that it hurts Rodney to look at it. "We buy and sell all sorts of stuff, don't we, Mer?"

"Uh huh," Rodney says, dead-pan, feeling the remembrance of Ronon's dry sarcasm tinge his words, "regular merchants, we are."

Rodney can see how that makes her stop and reconsider, gaze flicking from John to Rodney with a sudden suspicion born of reactions that seem a little off—working in a bar all day no doubt makes you an old hand at picking up on the small details that might demand wariness in a galaxy that has known the Wraith. "Where did you two say you were from again?" Her voice is so close to casual that Rodney wouldn't have picked up on the note of tension in it if he hadn't been sure he would hear it.

He opens his mouth to give their standard cover story, purposefully so clichéd that no one would ever question it—_Mer and Jehan, two simple cloth merchants from Santellía_—but John cuts him off. "We're from Atlantis," he says.

Rodney closes his eyes so he won't have to see it, but when he opens them again, when he looks at John, he knows it must have been there anyway: the look of blank incomprehension, the vaguely puzzled expression on the woman's face that came from knowing John must have said something, but not knowing what that something was.

"I don't—I don't know—where?" she begins, visibly straining to make something whole of the tumble of broken syllables that she'd heard instead of Atlantis, but Rodney cuts her off with a shake of his head.

"It's okay," he says, "Little place. Doesn't get many tourists. Big on, uh... pig farming. You'll never have heard of it. We'll just—come on, Jehan." He stands and grabs John by the sleeve of his shirt, tugs at him until he's standing and then steers them both in the direction of the guestrooms, away to their borrowed bed.

Rodney waits for an explosion while they strip down for sleep: kicking off boots manufactured on Genia, shucking trousers bought on Heslin Prime and the thick, hooded pullovers that had been a bargain on Nesya, until both of them are standing there in just the fraying boxers that are the only tangible things they still have of home. John's little outburst down there should have been the precursor to something spectacular, the beginning of a tempest that would have Rodney giving back as good as he got, and he braces for it; he's grown used to being angry with John because John's not really angry with him. His spine is stiffening with the tension of waiting for it, of waiting for John to say _something_; but when Rodney looks up from washing his face in the spring-cold water provided in a ewer on the dresser, all he sees is a middle-aged man, sitting on the edge of his bed in worn, blue-striped boxers and bare feet, scrubbing at his face with his hands.

John looks tired, and that makes Rodney feel tired all of a sudden: strips the anger from him, rids him of the nervous fury that's been giving strength to over-worked muscle and suffering bone for most of the day. For the best part of three months, if he's being honest with himself.

"Can we just..." John mumbles against his hands, starting and then stopping, words halting in time with the hitch of his breath. "Can we not—"

"Sleep," Rodney sighs, then stoops to turn down the bed covers, thick layers testament to the fact that this is not a world which has yet discovered the joys of central heating. "Just—go to sleep, get some rest, so that in the morning, we can continue on unhindered in our fine and glorious tradition of not talking about things, okay?"

John snorts, but doesn't object. He climbs under the covers to lie next to Rodney; with John's stiff, cool body lying beside his own, Rodney feels as if the bed is at least three times larger than it really is.

There's silence in the room for a while. From outside in the hallway come the sound of gently protesting floorboards as other guests pass back and forth between their rooms and the taproom. Someone passes by with an unusually heavy, syncopated tread that speaks of a man drunk past caring about it; whoever it is ricochets off one of the brightly painted walls, the impact evidently enough to dislodge a ballad from his throat. It's an Ifrullian love song, the lyrics less about refined emotions than it is about metaphors taken straight from the barnyard, and lying there on his back, Rodney can feel himself start to flush.

He clears his throat, feels himself babble something in an attempt to hide his embarrassment—he's never wanted to hear someone use goat metaphors to describe the genitalia of a human male. "Well," he says, "that's delightfully... rural. Country. Down home with _The Waltons_. As it were."

Next to him, John shifts, and the bed creaks. There's a pause like he's thinking, before he says, tentative in an unwilling and undeclared truce, "If this is an excuse to say 'Goodnight, John-Boy'..."

Rodney feels his chin come up. "Not in the least." Mostly because he hadn't thought of it first.

John takes a breath, and Rodney knows instinctively what he's going to say before he says it. "Don't—"

But, "Goodnight, Mer," John says, voice an inflected sing-song, and Rodney flinches.

"_Don't_," he says hoarsely, because not that name. That shouldn't be the one they use when it's just the two of them: not when that's a name Rodney abandoned by choice and John uses only to tease, to mock; not when there's a name only they can utter, and hear, and understand. Why use a deliberately forgotten name when there's one that's been taken from them? "Rodney. When you don't have to... call me Rodney."

"We got what we wanted," John says, as if Rodney had needed the reminder of all the ways they'd discovered that wishes are double-sided things, able to cut finely, to separate the _will_ from the _want_ and reveal the raw chasm that can lie between them. The two of them together, they'd worked for a way that would keep Atlantis safe, keep its towers standing free from the threat of war and hurt, from the sound of people screaming. And they'd succeeded—no one wants to take Atlantis from them now, because no one can remember there's an Atlantis to take; no one shouts in its halls now because there's no one whose mouth can shape syllables to echo there; Atlantis exists, but it lives only in the way Rodney can whisper _Atlantis_ to John, and John will know precisely what he means.

There's a rustle of bed-sheets as John turns over, and silence for a moment too before Rodney feels John sag against the sheets in the sudden, whole-body relaxation that means he's fallen asleep. Rodney stays awake for a long time, staring at a long, narrow crack in the ceiling plaster, made deeper and more vague by candlelight.

Still, he must have slept, because he starts awake an indeterminate time later. Rodney's internal body clock tells him that if he were back on Atlantis, it would be around 0300AST; on moonless Kirneasia, it's hard to tell. He knows straight away, though, why he woke: John is sitting up in bed, hands curled loose and empty in his lap, and though with the candle gone out, it's near to pitch-black in the room, if Rodney squints, he can just about distinguish the waiting profile of John's face.

"What?" Rodney mumbles, most of his face still mashed into the goose-down pillow that's far too comfortable for him to want to raise his head.

"Heard something," John says.

"Not your job anymore," Rodney says, rubbing at his eyes, and then snorts because he _knows_, knows what John's thinking. "Oh, stop that. That, that is just ridiculous, stop drawing parallels where there are none, you are worse than every Freud-loving, literature-analysing pseudo-academic—"

John shifts so that he's oriented towards Rodney, and now there's a note of amusement in his voice. "No, McKay. I just heard something. Party must still be in full swing down below—singing woke me up."

If Rodney strains, he can hear the sounds of off-key enthusiasm coming from below. "Oh."

"Yeah."

Rodney knows that if he were a wise man, rather than merely someone who is very, very, very smart, he would have closed his mouth right then, rolled back over and tried his best to get another three or four hours of sleep despite the decidedly unorthopaedic nature of the mattress. If he were better at dealing with people, he would lie down, shut up, and let John... think it out in the dark, or however it is that he works through the things that roil around underneath that mop of hair.

Rodney has long since accepted the kind of man he's never going to be.

He pitches his voice to be at its most conciliatory, its most mild-mannered. "You know, if you would actually just—"

"McKay."

"I'm merely pointing out that—"

"Mc_Kay_."

Rodney hears a faint thump which can only be one of John's fists rebounding against the bedclothes, and rolls his eyes in the darkness. Great. Rodney struggles into a sitting position and fumbles for the candle beside the bed, relighting it with the help of the small tinderbox. The light it gives off is far from strong, but when Rodney sets it to stand in a little puddle of its own quickly drying wax on the table, it shines bright enough to show John to him: dark hair and strong arms, squinting eyes and the fine lines fanning out from around them.

"If you have a coronary before we get to Tas Remlis," Rodney says, "If this whole, whole epic journey spiritual quest _thing_ is all going to be for nothing..."

"Jesus Christ." John flops back against the mattress with a thud strong enough to make the bed frame shake a little. "Rodney."

"What? All I'm doing is pointing out that..." Rodney stops and blinks. "Oh my god. The late night arguments, the alcohol consumption, the hideous bedclothes... We're reliving my parents' marriage. All we need is Jeannie walking in at the worst possible time and—"

John makes a face, the moue of his mouth deepened, made more petulant in the flicker of the candle's flame. "Can we not talk about your parents when we're in bed?"

"Can we not talk about my parents, _ever_?" Rodney sighs and lies back down beside John, wriggling so that their heads lie close, close enough that Rodney imagines that wild tufts of light brown hair must mingle with black on their shared pillow. On each exhale, the prickle of awareness that comes from having John's familiar warmth so close to him, brought closer by breathing, sets each particular hair on his arm on end.

"Parent truce," John agrees, amiable and wry, and Rodney debates within himself for a moment or two as to whether this is the kind of situation that demands a pinky swear—Rodney doesn't underestimate the efficacy of a good pinky swear.

John doesn't say anything for a while, though out of the corner of his eye, Rodney can see John's mouth twitch like there's something important he's thinking about that he desperately doesn't want to give voice to. Typical.

"We set out tomorrow morning?" Rodney says, just to have something to say; just to give John an out.

"'Nother thirty miles to go," John says, looking sideways at him from beneath his lashes.

His voice is carefully dry, as if he knows what Rodney's trying to do, and possibly that's what gets away from Rodney: the knowledge of all the ways John knows how to read him, the ways they can't truly hide from one another because they meet one another, always.

"Do you think," Rodney begins, and he closes his eyes against the way his voice is threatening to crack, "Could you—stop being angry with me? At least, at least until we've seen this through."

When he blinks them open again, it's to see that John has moved closer and is looking at him with such intent, as if to see Rodney more clearly: gaze moving from eyes to the freckles on his nose to line of throat and belly and back again. John's moved to lie on his side, and his head is propped on one hand. He's looking _for_ something, Rodney realises, and he can't remember the last time he felt this scared: feels his fingertips creep up his own arm to seek out the fading slash of scar tissue, rub some comfort there, and startles a little when John clears his throat and says, rusty, "No."

Rodney feels his eyes widen, but then John shakes his head again, more emphatically, and says, "Not with you. Not with _you_."

And then John leans in to kiss him, slowly and slowly, his eyes open as if to judge what Rodney's reaction will be: as if it would be any different now than the first time, the second, the hundredth, as if Rodney could escape from the magnetism that orients him always towards John, the elemental-something that lodged itself behind Rodney's breastbone before he was aware of it, before it ever asked his consent.

Rodney could question it, could pause to ask John if this is okay—if now, the night before their last attempt, it's okay for John to kiss him breathless and take away the last of his doubts. But he's always been surprisingly okay to let John lead him wherever he will, and slowly Rodney's eyes slip closed: he whispers _idiot_ to John, and kisses him back with all the force of their shared loneliness, with the weight of the grief the two of them have been carrying around for months all alone, though it should have been a galaxy's to share.

They press close together, burrowing back down under the heavy mound of the blankets so that the air around them is as heated as the breath that John kisses back into Rodney. Chest against chest, bellies snug and companionable, the pivot and shift of hips moving closer. Rodney slings an arm around John's waist, lets the kiss turn as languid and as easy as they ever get, takes advantage of the comforts of this bed and of a close and beloved body.

The candle on the night-stand gutters and flares out, its flame lost in a pool of white wax, and in the sudden dark, John whispers _please_. Rodney nips carefully at the rough edge of John's jaw and hums a _yes_, works boxers down to tangle around John's knees so that his legs are held just _so_ when Rodney burrows down beneath the covers. The long muscles in John's thighs shiver when Rodney fits his scarred and callused palms to the planes of John's stomach, to the curves of his hips, and when Rodney bends to take him in with such sudden and complete generosity that John bucks and swears with it.

"Can't," John says, hands restless and tangling in sheets and blankets and even up to clutch at his own hair. It's been a while, Rodney knows, but John is desperate beyond what three weeks sharing of a cramped dorm on board ship could call up in the body of a man in his forties: it's a desperation he knows too intimately himself, one that's born along in each pulse of his blood, the knowledge that if one of them goes, three syllables will fade along with their heartbeat. It's true desperation, born of something too far beyond fear and too near love; it's an ache they both carry, marrow-deep in their bones; and Rodney has the solid weight of John's cock in his mouth, knows that John _can_: and he goes down until his jaw aches with it.

He pulls off just before the end, works John with his hand and says _don't forget, forget, we_—and John seems to know what he means. Their bodies curl closer and closer, a symmetry of need, and though in the dark, Rodney can't see him, he remembers that once-and-always look in John's eyes, the way he always bites his lip, just before; hears John gasp as he comes, murmur, and the shockingly crisp, clean consonants when he breathes out _Atlantis_; when Rodney knows just what John is saying.

John takes care of him, too: efficient, well-practiced strokes of his hand; the nip of teeth against Rodney's earlobe; filthy, half-formed plans for what he's going to do to Rodney if, when, _when_— Rodney groans, and the curve of John's shoulder is shaped just right for him to rest against and breathe out, out.

Water from the pitcher cleans them both; a tug on the blankets wraps them up in warmth, Rodney's toes curled ten-square and cool against John's calves; John says _last stage, tomorrow_, and kisses Rodney's temple before he drifts off to sleep. Rodney could answer him, but he finds that the words will keep until they're ready to be said, until Atlantis is shining and whole again; and there'll be a long road ahead of them tomorrow anyway, plenty of time for the two of them to walk in step.


End file.
